The Best Place to Eat Right Now Is In... A) a hospital B) a car wash C) an arcade D) a ballpark E) all of the above

Continued (page 4 of 5)

It was the same hopeful fool who, not long before, had found himself pushing through Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport, headed for One Flew South, chef Duane Nutter's upscale eatery tucked into a corner of Terminal E. Walking in was like entering the Star Trek holodeck set on Soothing Restaurant World, and once again I was rewarded, this time by a dish I'd never seen before—a deconstructed fish "chowder" in which rich white miso stood in for cream while a large clamshell held the remaining ingredients: celery, potato, and a cube of fatty salmon. It would have been a pleasing revelation anywhere in the world. I was getting used to this. We all are.

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Indeed, there is no place left—geographic or institutional—where good food would be noteworthy simply for being unlikely. Well, not quite no place.... At one point, I found myself in a hospital on the outskirts of Raleigh, North Carolina, surrounded by men in white coats. Each, thankfully, was at the top of his field. One described for me the other's credentials, how he had gone to the very best schools and run a successful practice elsewhere before being recruited to this facility. I was in the very best hands, he assured me, clapping his colleague on the back: "You should taste his cannoli!"

I was standing in the vast kitchen serving Rex Hospital, where Jim McGrody has brought the Food Revolution to the shitshow that is American health care. Around us, McGrody's team of sous-chefs, some of whom attended the Culinary Institute of America, were at work: A cook was grilling yellow squash in batches. Another lifted a tawny, glistening roasted pork loin from an oven while yet another mixed fresh sausage with spinach and rice, to make stuffing.

McGrody has been a lifelong institutional chef, first in the army and then at various universities. It was while working at his first hospital, in Washington, D.C., that he began to believe that the food he was in charge of serving seemed antithetical to anything resembling healing. He began to fantasize about a better way. "Cooks in our hospitals know how to make veal stock. They know how to make pan gravy using the fond," McGrody writes in his memoir/manifesto, What We Feed Our Patients. "The days of canned peas and three-compartment plates...are over."

The kitchen at Rex went a long way toward fulfilling that fantasy. In an office off the kitchen floor, an army of operators fielded orders from patients in the hospital's 433 beds. Each is provided with a room-service-style menu featuring such items as pecan-crusted sautéed chicken topped with maple-butter pan sauce and lime-and-ginger-glazed salmon. A software program alerted the operators to any allergies or other proscriptions: a diabetic ordering four chocolate "mud" shakes, for instance. Even those patients labeled "non-appropriates"—those who can't swallow traditional food—are treated to dignified fare like fresh peas pureed and molded into actual pea shapes, or blueberry panna cotta made from low-fat yogurt. Ingredients were overwhelmingly fresh. Across the board, the notion that healthy and tasty are not mutually exclusive, a lesson that has perhaps had a harder time penetrating the South than many other places, was emphasized—not by lecture but by example. "When I die," McGrody told me, "I want my tombstone to read 'The Man Who Killed Off Fruit Cocktail.' "

It's instinctive that healthful, good-tasting food sourced locally and served lovingly makes sense in terms of healing and investment in one's community. That, of course, doesn't answer why it's been allowed to happen. The fact that McGrody's program has provided a net gain of $1.9 million over three years does. Partly, that represents a savings over the industrial-catering company that previously handled food service. But it also reflects an increase in revenue from patients who choose Rex over other hospitals—just as they might choose Boise's Modern Hotel and its cocktail program over a motel with a sports bar specializing in appletinis. McGrody heard about one who demanded to be taken to the "Rex Carlton." Grassroots locavorism and hidden hipster speakeasies are all well and good; it's when the market speaks through once monolithic, indifferent institutions that we know something serious is afoot.

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And so finally east, across the amber waves of grain to New York, the land of my birth. To find a proper example of the Food Revolution in New York City was a challenge, only because the revolution has succeeded so wildly here that it's become the establishment. From the windy shores of the Rockaways, toward which cadres of foodies troop each summer to eat tacos from beachfront shacks, to the once industrial lots of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, now lousy with food trucks, there are few cities in which Good Food Everywhere could be taken quite so literally. Even the Upper West Side, which used to be a reliable object of mockery for its lack of decent eating, has a Momofuku Milk Bar.

The Modern's salad, to fortify (not really) against one of its genever old-fashioneds.

The only answer was to venture to the one place I would never go on my own: the very bastion of old, stodgy, arrogant New York, the belly of the beast. I speak, of course, of Yankee Stadium.

I will allow that I write from the point of view of a lifelong Mets fan and Yankee hater. Nevertheless, I think it's fairly objective to point out that the mighty Yankees have lagged behind the city's trend toward good food in its sports facilities, whether Shake Shack at the Mets' Citi Field or the Andrew Carmellini menu unveiled last season at Madison Square Garden. Perhaps this is on the theory that their fans can subsist entirely on a diet of monuments. Whatever the reason, the stadium has stood as evidence that while it is indeed now possible to get good food everywhere, it remains equally possible to get bad food anywhere.